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Company has been called nasty for letting us gauge the exorbitant narcissism of the married couples who demand that Bobby offer them, in addition to endless material assistance, the philosophical consolation of a psychopathology they can think of as worse than their own. On the contrary, this spiteful-seeming vision is ipso facto extraordinarily generous, since in adopting a perspective on the couple that is not, for a change, the couple’s own, it recognizes the social existence of a whole ignored population of unmarried, not to say unmarriageable, others.
Company only becomes truly nasty with Bobby’s last number, when it writes off this perspective -- and this population -- to become (in Sondheim’s chillingly apt words) “the most pro-marriage show in the world.” As abruptly as if he were knocked off his horse on the road to Damascus, Bobby finds himself testifying to the (social, psychological, sexual) rightness of the couple after all. But worse than the deus ex machina is the psychological realism meant to make it less crude. Nothing so ridiculous here as the joy of an instantaneous conversion; more plausibly, Bobby must suffer the anguish of a cure whose promised end is nowhere in sight -- indeed whose only present measure is how desperately the patient wants to want what he still can’t want, but has only been brought to concede that he should. “Being Alive” could hardly be more repugnant to watch if, instead of prodding Bobby with bits of psychobabble, his married friends gave him electric shocks while he looked at pictures of naked men; the number does nothing but enact the ruthlessness of a marital regime intolerant of the very exceptions by which, in fact, it has just been shown to live. Nor are we especially cheered by the fact that we have company -- increasing and increasingly mixed -- in this opinion of
Company’s double-dealing, for it is the kind that only misery could love.
-- D.A. Miller, Place for Us
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